Miasma update! On my post this morning about last night's odiferous fog, I quoted an e-mail from Seattle's superstar meteorologist Cliff Mass:

We now have a very strong inversion over the city, which is capping a thin layer of cold, foggy air... Inversions act as atmospheric lids. Winds are very weak. Between the inversion and weak winds, there is very little mixing, so pollutants (and smells) are trapped. So I suspect you are smelling your neighbors' garbage and others are smelling some of the sewer smells that normally are mixed out.

But the idea that we were just smelling ourselves didn't totally satisfy Mass—inversions are not uncommon around here, but the scent was—who spent part of the day hunting down the source of the stink.

His hypothesis: flooding of farmland to our east, followed by warm temperatures to let all that agricultural muck simmer for a while, plus air trajectories that brought some of that reek to us, plus the no-wind and strong inversion that let it linger here for a while.

Compound all that with us smelling ourselves more than we usually do, and it makes a pretty convincing theory for why Seattle didn't just smell like one unpleasant thing—garbage, sewage, a pulp mill, a "fog... full of fish farts"—but a lot of unpleasant things at the same time.

What we will smell tonight? The suspense is crushing.